Privatisation of war
· $30bn goes to private military
· Fears over 'hired guns' policy
· British firms get big slice of contracts
· Deals in Baghdad, Kabul and Balkans
Ian Traynor
Wednesday December 10, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html
Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are
now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the
Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.
While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest
contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the
10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.
The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted
security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the
first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100
servicemen and women; now there are 10.
The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and
peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no
return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it.
While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental accounting
and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army estimates
that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi
campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly
$30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies.
The myriad military and security companies thriving on this largesse are at
the sharp end of a revolution in military affairs that is taking us into
unknown territory - the partial privatisation of war.
"This is a trend that is growing and Iraq is the high point of the trend,"
said Peter Singer, a security analyst at Washington's Brookings Institution.
"This is a sea change in the way we prosecute warfare. There are historical
parallels, but we haven't seen them for 250 years."
When America launched its invasion in March, the battleships in the Gulf were
manned by US navy personnel. But alongside them sat civilians from four
companies operating some of the world's most sophisticated weapons systems.
When the unmanned Predator drones, the Global Hawks, and the B-2 stealth
bombers went into action, their weapons systems, too, were operated and
maintained by non-military personnel working for private companies.
The private sector is even more deeply involved in the war's aftermath. A US
company has the lucrative contracts to train the new Iraqi army, another to
recruit and train an Iraqi police force.
But this is a field in which British companies dominate, with nearly half of
the dozen or so private firms in Iraq coming from the UK.
The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk International, based in Hampton,
Middlesex. It is supplying hired Gurkhas, Fijian paramilitaries and, it is
believed, ex-SAS veterans, to guard the Baghdad headquarters of Paul Bremer,
the US overlord, according to analysts.
It is a trend that has been growing worldwide since the end of the cold war, a
booming business which entails replacing soldiers wherever possible with
highly paid civilians and hired guns not subject to standard military
disciplinary procedures.
The biggest US military base built since Vietnam, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo,
was constructed and continues to be serviced by private contractors. At Tuzla
in northern Bosnia, headquarters for US peacekeepers, everything that can be
farmed out to private businesses has been. The bill so far runs to more than
$5bn. The contracts include those to the US company ITT, which supplies the
armed guards, overwhelmingly US private citizens, at US installations.
In Israel, a US company supplies the security for American diplomats, a very
risky business. In Colombia, a US company flies the planes destroying the
coca plantations and the helicopter gunships protecting them, in what some
would characterise as a small undeclared war.
In Kabul, a US company provides the bodyguards to try to save President Hamid
Karzai from assassination, raising questions over whether they are combatants
in a deepening conflict with emboldened Taliban insurgents.
And in the small town of Hadzici west of Sarajevo, a military compound houses
the latest computer technology, the war games simulations challenging the
Bosnian army's brightest young officers.
Crucial to transforming what was an improvised militia desperately fighting
for survival into a modern army fit eventually to join Nato, the army
computer centre was established by US officers who structured, trained, and
armed the Bosnian military. The Americans accomplished a similar mission in
Croatia and are carrying out the same job in Macedonia.
The input from the US military has been so important that the US experts can
credibly claim to have tipped the military balance in a region ravaged by
four wars in a decade. But the American officers, including several four-star
generals, are retired, not serving. They work, at least directly, not for the
US government, but for a private company, Military Professional Resources
Inc.
"In the Balkans MPRI are playing an incredibly critical role. The balance of
power in the region was altered by a private company. That's one measure of
the sea change," said Mr Singer, the author of a recent book on the subject,
Corporate Warriors.
The surge in the use of private companies should not be confused with the
traditional use of mercenaries in armed conflicts. The use of mercenaries is
outlawed by the Geneva conventions, but no one is accusing the Pentagon,
while awarding more than 3,000 contracts to private companies over the past
decade, of violating the laws of war.
The Pentagon will "pursue additional opportunities to outsource and
privatise", the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pledged last year and
military analysts expect him to try to cut a further 200,000 jobs in the
armed forces.
It is this kind of "downsizing" that has fed the growth of the military
private sector.
Since the end of the cold war it is reckoned that six million servicemen have
been thrown on to the employment market with little to peddle but their
fighting and military skills. The US military is 60% the size of a decade
ago, the Soviet collapse wrecked the colossal Red Army, the East German
military melted away, the end of apartheid destroyed the white officer class
in South Africa. The British armed forces, notes Mr Singer, are at their
smallest since the Napoleonic wars.
The booming private sector has soaked up much of this manpower and expertise.
It also enables the Americans, in particular, to wage wars by proxy and
without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional
deployments are subject.
>From the level of the street or the trenches to the rarefied corridors of
strategic analysis and policy-making, however, the problems surfacing are
immense and complex.
One senior British officer complains that his driver was recently approached
and offered a fortune to move to a "rather dodgy outfit". Ex-SAS veterans in
Iraq can charge up to $1,000 a day.
"There's an explosion of these companies attracting our servicemen
financially," said Rear Admiral Hugh Edleston, a Royal Navy officer who is
just completing three years as chief military adviser to the international
administration running Bosnia.
He said that outside agencies were sometimes better placed to provide training
and resources. "But you should never mix serving military with security
operations. You need to be absolutely clear on the division between the
military and the paramilitary."
"If these things weren't privatised, uniformed men would have to do it and
that draws down your strength," said another senior retired officer engaged
in the private sector. But he warned: "There is a slight risk that things can
get out of hand and these companies become small armies themselves."
And in Baghdad or Bogota, Kabul or Tuzla, there are armed company employees
effectively licensed to kill. On the job, say guarding a peacekeepers'
compound in Tuzla, the civilian employees are subject to the same rules of
engagement as foreign troops.
But if an American GI draws and uses his weapon in an off-duty bar brawl, he
will be subject to the US judicial military code. If an American guard
employed by the US company ITT in Tuzla does the same, he answers to Bosnian
law. By definition these companies are frequently operating in "failed
states" where national law is notional. The risk is the employees can
literally get away with murder.
Or lesser, but appalling crimes. Dyncorp, for example, a Pentagon favourite,
has the contract worth tens of millions of dollars to train an Iraqi police
force. It also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police and was
implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its employees accused of rape
and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12. A number of employees
were fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases to result involved the
two whistleblowers who exposed the episode and were sacked.
"Dyncorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi police contract," said
Madeleine Rees, the chief UN human rights officer in Sarajevo.
Of the two court cases, one US police officer working for Dyncorp in Bosnia,
Kathryn Bolkovac, won her suit for wrongful dismissal. The other involving a
mechanic, Ben Johnston, was settled out of court. Mr Johnston's suit against
Dyncorp charged that he "witnessed co-workers and supervisors literally
buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees
would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they
had purchased".
There are other formidable problems surfacing in what is uncharted territory -
issues of loyalty, accountability, ideology, and national interest. By
definition, a private military company is in Iraq or Bosnia not to pursue US,
UN, or EU policy, but to make money.
The growing clout of the military services corporations raises questions about
an insidious, longer-term impact on governments' planning, strategy and
decision-taking.
Mr Singer argues that for the first time in the history of the modern nation
state, governments are surrendering one of the essential and defining
attributes of statehood, the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
But for those on the receiving end, there seems scant alternative.
"I had some problems with some of the American generals," said Enes
Becirbasic, a Bosnian military official who managed the Bosnian side of the
MPRI projects to build and arm a Bosnian army. "It's a conflict of interest.
I represent our national interest, but they're businessmen. I would have
preferred direct cooperation with state organisations like Nato or the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But we had no choice. We
had to use MPRI."
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